Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office is a hot mess. New boss, and a million dollars, better fix it
Taxpayers, take note: The Pierce County government job that earns the largest paycheck is about to be lifted into an even higher salary orbit.
No, it’s not the county executive, sheriff, auditor or assessor-treasurer, though each member of that elected quarter will get a modest pay raise next year (topped by County Executive Bruce Dammeier, who will earn $201,015 in 2020).
The No. 1 earner, by far, is the county medical examiner, according to county salary data. This doctor, appointed by the county executive, runs an 18-employee office responsible for investigating violent or unexplained deaths, conducting autopsies, identifying bodies, recovering tissue and organs, and notifying next of kin.
Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas Clark was paid $260,000 in 2018 to oversee specialized forensic duties that aren’t for the squeamish. Clark will retire next year, his administration damaged by a series of complaints that embarrassed the county and drew public attention to an office that seldom gets it.
Now the county is advertising a more competitive salary range — $280,000 to $325,000 — with the hope of attracting a strong successor from a shallow talent pool. There are only around 500 forensic pathologists in the U.S., so they’re in very high demand.
(For a comparison, King County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Richard Harruff, who’s been running that office for 20 years, was paid $283,000 last year.)
A fresh start and a chance to restore confidence and morale will be good for the Pierce County ME’s office in Tacoma. It needs to lay to rest, once and for all, the dysfunctional dynamics that marked Clark’s decade-long tenure.
But it comes with a hefty price tag. Executive staff requested an extra $1.4 million in the 2020-21 budget, funds intended to let the medical examiner hire up to six new employees. The County Council cut it to around $1 million, which is still generous; it’s among the largest funding increases that council members gave any department in the $2.4 billion budget they adopted last week.
It will be money well spent if it helps the ME’s office run more efficiently, improves communication with the public (especially grieving loved ones) and expedites the return of bodies so families can proceed with burial or cremation.
County leaders must closely monitor the increased spending, establish accountability measures and ensure the office doesn’t lose national accreditation.
Their first order of business: Recruit an outstanding chief medical examiner. Dammeier’s staff plans to interview candidates in December after a search this fall that took them to Kansas City, Houston, Miami, Chicago and Baltimore.
Making this critical hire will bring a welcome end to a troubling and expensive chapter involving the ME office’s two highest-ranking officials, who also happen to be Pierce County’s two highest-paid employees.
Clark was the subject of county and state-level complaints this year by associate medical examiner Dr. Megan Quinn. She alleged Clark mishandled some child death investigations.
It wasn’t the first time Clark fell under scrutiny. In 2016, a review of another whistleblower complaint from a different employee concluded that Clark ran the office with a “vindictive” and “cruel” management style.
Settlements were reached in which Quinn will receive $450,000 and resign effective the end of this year; Clark will collect $250,000 and step down when his replacement takes over in 2020.
Those settlement payouts, combined with $1 million budgeted for new hires over the next two years, represent the projected cost to overhaul the medical examiner’s office — to tear its leadership down to the studs and rebuild it.
But is it really necessary to expand staffing from 18 to 24, since the office has already added personnel in recent years? That’s a reasonable question raised by County Council member Derek Young at a budget hearing this month.
“This is double the number of positions than when I came in 2015,” Young said, “but we haven’t doubled the number of death investigations.”
He’s correct. Since 2016, the annual death investigation load has grown from 1,213 to a projected 1,460 this year, while the number of autopsies has dropped from 436 to 370.
The problem was, Clark reportedly spent at least 90 percent of his time in the autopsy suite. This came at the expense of the managerial focus, community engagement and partnership building the office sorely lacks.
While the number of positions is negotiable, the next medical examiner clearly needs more hands-on support so that he or she is free to be the big-picture manager Clark wasn’t.
That may mean adding a third pathologist, in addition to the two the county’s about to lose. And given the challenge of attracting these hard-to-find doctors, it may mean creating another spot at the top of the payroll ladder.
If that’s what it takes to complete a million-dollar rebuild of our shaky medical examiner’s office, so be it. But taxpayers should demand, and Pierce County officials must ensure, that there won’t be need for another.